8.5: Work-Family Balance

The Second Shift

Chapter 5 introduced sociologist Arlie Hochschild's (1989) concept of the second shift: the unpaid domestic labor women perform after their paid workday ends. Decades later, the pattern persists. Women still do a disproportionate share of housework and childcare, even when employed full time. In two-parent families, mothers perform an estimated 60 to 90 percent of childcare tasks. Even when male partners are unemployed, employed women continue to do more than half the housework (Brines, 1994).

Why the Imbalance Persists

Several competing explanations have been proposed for why the division of domestic labor remains so unequal.

Time availability theory suggests that whoever has more free time does more housework. This sounds reasonable, but it fails to explain why women do more housework even when they work the same number of hours as their partners (Bianchi et al., 2000).

The relative income hypothesis proposes that whoever earns less does more housework. But research has found that women who out-earn their husbands actually do more housework, not less. This counterintuitive finding has been interpreted through the lens of gender role ideology, the belief that men and women should occupy distinct and complementary roles within the household. Men who feel threatened by economic dependence on their wives may restore a sense of masculinity by avoiding "feminine" housework, and women may increase their domestic contributions to compensate for violating the norm of male breadwinning (Brines, 1994).

Maternal gatekeeping describes a pattern in which some women resist sharing domestic responsibilities, deriving identity and self-worth from domestic expertise (Allen & Hawkins, 1999). While the concept captures a real dynamic, feminist scholars have criticized it for shifting blame entirely onto women (Gaunt, 2008). Gatekeeping, where it occurs, may develop in response to partners who perform domestic tasks poorly or inconsistently, whether from genuine lack of experience or from what has colloquially been called 'weaponized incompetence,' performing tasks so poorly or needing so much support with their completion that the other partner takes over rather than continuing to try to share the load (Deutsch, 1999). Framing the imbalance as women's reluctance to share, while minimizing men's failure to fully participate, does not sufficiently describe the problem.

Work-Family Conflict

The tension between work and family roles has been framed through two competing hypotheses. The scarcity hypothesis proposes that adding roles (worker, parent, spouse, caregiver) creates stress, because time and energy are finite. The expansionist hypothesis proposes the opposite: that multiple roles can provide stimulation, self-esteem, and social support. Research generally supports the expansionist view, finding that most employed women report better physical and mental health than non-employed women (Barnett & Hyde, 2001). However, certain conditions increase the risk of work-family conflict, such as low-paying jobs, having many children, and having an unsupportive partner. Men and women now report similar levels of work-family conflict, though men's conflict has been increasing faster in recent years (Shockley et al., 2017).

Same-sex couples tend to divide household labor more equitably than heterosexual couples, though the partner who earns less or works fewer hours still tends to do more (Goldberg, 2013). Trans and nonbinary relationships are not well-studied, but there is some evidence that for trans men the division of labor may shift during and after transition as partners renegotiate roles and expectations (Pfeffer, 2017). Research on how trans women's relationships navigate household labor division remains absent from the literature.

Flexible Work and Parental Leave

Flexible work arrangements, including flex time, compressed workweeks, job shares, and remote work, have been shown to increase productivity, job satisfaction, and reduce absenteeism. However, both men and women who use flexible arrangements face work flexibility stigma: they are evaluated more negatively than colleagues who do not. Men face an additional penalty, being perceived as less masculine for prioritizing family over work (Rudman & Mescher, 2013; Vandello et al., 2013). Trans workers who need time for medical appointments related to gender-affirming care may face similar stigma, compounded by anti-trans bias. Inclusive workplace policies that frame medical leave broadly, rather than creating pressure to disclose specific treatments, protect trans workers without singling them out.

Parental leave policy is another critical area. Paid parental leave has been consistently linked to better outcomes for both parents and children, including reduced infant mortality, lower rates of postpartum depression, increased breastfeeding, and improved child development (Nandi et al., 2018). Ruhm (2000) found that a 10-week increase in paid parental leave was associated with a 2 to 3 percent reduction in infant death rates across European countries. In the United States, research on California's paid family leave program found a 12 percent reduction in postneonatal mortality after the program was implemented (Montoya-Williams et al., 2020). Despite this evidence, the United States remains the only OECD nation with no national guarantee of paid parental leave. As many as 23 percent of employed mothers return to work within 10 days of giving birth, largely because they cannot afford unpaid time off (Van Niel et al., 2020). Access to paid leave is also unequal by race. Black and Latina women have significantly less access to paid leave through either employers or government programs than their white counterparts (Goodman et al., 2021).

Section Key Terms